How to Allow Videos and Images in WordPress Comments

Need to liven up your comment section? One easy way is to allow your visitors to insert both videos and images into them.

Below we’ll go over a few plugins that will let you do just that. First up, videos.

Oembed in Comments

The Oembed in Comments plugin will allow you to embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and other video sites that WordPress supports.

You only need to insert the URL to the video (as you can do in a post).

It seems that Admins (but not other users) can also use embed codes – which, of course, allows you to control the size of the video.

For the admin, in the comment moderation section, you will simply see the URL of the video, not the video itself.

And here’s a look at a YouTube video in a comement.

By the way, this plugin also lets you insert documents from places like Scribed and other sites that WordPress supports.

Comment Images

The Content Images plugin allows you to easily upload an image and insert it in a comment.

Here’s a look at the button available for uploading an image from your computer.

In the comment moderation section, the admin will see a thumbnail of the image being uploaded. The image automatically gets added to the Media Library, and so if you need to edit it or delete, you can do so there.

The image gets inserted below whatever text you enter into the comment box.

There’s no option to insert an image with a URL with this plugin. That said, when you click the Browse button in order to search you computer, if you put the URL of an image in that box, it will actually pull that image into the comment section. Your visitors most likely won’t know that, but it is technically possible to use the URL for a image (and it will get pulled into your Media Library). So there you are.

By the way, it also seems that you can insert images into comments without a plugin with some plain HTML code like this:

<img src="url-to-image.jpg">

Of course that isn’t very easy for most, and unless you put an message in your comment area informing visitors of that, few if any will actually realize they can.

And so there you have it. If you have an active comment section, and you start allowing images and/or videos there, it won’t take long for people to catch on and start turning discussions into multimedia exchanges.

photo credit: Horia Varlan